They emptied a lake in Madrid and found something unexpected!

With more than 1,722 hectares, the Casa de Campo is the largest public park in Madrid. To put it in context, it is five times Central Park (New York) and seven times the size of Hyde Park (London).

Declared an Asset of Cultural Interest, the park is the green lung of the Spanish capital. Inside is the great Casa de Campo Lake, whose surface area exceeds 80,000 square meters and is close to 165,000 cubic meters in volume.

Obviously, thoroughly cleaning a lake of this size is not easy. So when the city does the job, it puts all possible effort into it.

This was the case in 2017, the last time the Madrid City Council ordered the lake to be drained and clean its depths.

The previous time it had been emptied for cleaning was a long time ago: 1982, or 35 years ago. During the decades that passed, the depths of the lake had had ample time to accumulate all kinds of items, ranging from those that everyone could imagine to the absolutely unexpected.

After the 2017 cleaning, the Madrid City Council made public some of the 'treasures' found in the drainage of the lake. In many cases, it is inexplicable how they could get there.

Among the outrageous items was that of the femur (thighbone) found at the bottom of the lake, forcing the police to investigate whether it belonged to a deceased person.

Ultimately, the bone turned out to be from a cow. But that didn’t make the case any less bizarre. It led to the big question: how did a cow's femur end up at the bottom of the Madrileña lake?

Photo: Likuan Wang / Unsplash

It would not be the last time that the police had to make inquiries about one of the findings. A firearm and ammunition were also seized by the authorities and taken to ballistics.

Interestingly, it seems easier to explain that there is a gun at the bottom of the lake than the bone of a cow.

The same thing happened with the desktop computer that was found in the depths of the lake. It seems that someone did not want the information it to be discovered and chose to hide it where no one would ever look for it.

Photo: Anthony Roberts / Unsplash

It may be less surprising that the murky waters of the lake hid hundreds of mobile phones, cameras, and watches.

Photo: Nadine Shaabana / Unsplash

The cleaning gave investigators the opportunity to appreciate the evolution of mobile communication through the variety of devices found in the water. They were all from the period between the previous cleaning in 1982 to the recent one in 2017.

Photo: Nastya Dulhiier / Unsplash

There were also hundreds of chairs offering seats to the lake's fish. Many of these chairs.had ended up at the bottom of the lake after a huge fight between fans of rival soccer teams.

Photo: José Manuel Esp / Unsplash

Is it possible that the relatives who threw the ashes of their relatives into the lake also threw the funeral urns into its waters. This is the only way to explain why there were several dozen of them buried inside of it.

Photo: Carlos Felipe Ramírez Mesa / Unsplash

Hard drives, wallets, documentation, credit cards... Classics in any crowded place that, in this case, remained safe because they were guarded by the schools of fish.

Photo: Two Paddles Ax and Leatherwork / Unsplash

Following the logic of the local government, the next draining of the Casa de Campo Lake would take place in 2052. That means a lot of time is left for the lake to gather new and exciting curiosities....